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From New Yorker

From Vox

Spread out over eight Netflix episodes, all this Austen riffing becomes a tell for the flagging creativity of the Bridgerton writers’ room. These are incredibly well-worn Regency tropes, and there’s room for so much more imaginative uses of this time period and these juicy characters — one might just steal plot ideas directly from Georgette Heyer, for example.

You’ll notice I’m not suggesting the writers simply faithfully adapt Quinn’s book. That’s because The Viscount Who Loves Me contains a wrinkle that romance readers easily accept but which would absolutely baffle Netflix viewers: Its main plot is essentially the same as that of the first book. If you’ll recall, the first season sees Anthony catching his sister Daphne and her dishy duke Simon alone in a compromising position, after which the two wed. Although they’re in love, Simon’s wish to never father children creates a huge conflict for them following their wedding, which the series spends the second half of season one trying to unravel.

In The Viscount Who Loves Me, the exact same thing happens to Anthony and Kate: Before Anthony’s attempt to woo a disinterested Edwina is far underway, he and Kate get caught in a rather extraordinary compromising position involving a bee sting. (It’s actually super angsty, albeit ridiculous.) They immediately get engaged and marry, then spend the rest of the book ironing out their deeper conflicts, misunderstandings, and insecurity.

While romance readers are used to seeing this “caught in a compromising position” trope happen over and over again in novels — it even repeats as a tossed-off side plot in season two — it’s easy to see Netflix viewers questioning a season two that does exactly the same thing as season one, just with different characters. So it makes complete sense that after the pivotal “bee sting” scene, Bridgerton departs from the book in a major way: Anthony proceeds with his courtship and eventual engagement to Edwina, all the while trying to resist his attraction to Kate. The stakes for Edwina to pull off a great marriage are much higher in this adaptation, so there’s theoretically more pressure on Kate to resist her own attraction to Anthony. It should all make for a delightful confection of sexual tension.

But after this plot divergence, Bridgerton’s second season suffers from a weird dual problem of compression and emptiness. Around the main plotline, the season works in plenty of plot points taken from later Bridgerton novels. It’s a clear attempt to consolidate the series’ eight novels into a much more condensed timeline. That approach seems preferable, given that the Bridgertons are always more entertaining as a unit than broken up into individuals.

Still, this compression means more distractions from the main plot. It means that Kate and Anthony should sizzle that much more whenever they’re onscreen together. But they… don’t. Despite Simone Ashley and Jonathan Bailey’s best efforts (and they’re both fantastic!), their moments of intimacy feel obligatory rather than impulsive, as if the writers tossed in physical touches whenever they got bored of trying to develop their relationship. The irresistible chemistry Kate and Anthony are meant to possess just isn’t quite there.

The considerable age difference between Edwina and Anthony — he’s about 13 or 14 years older — never causes explicit concern, but it looms uncomfortably over the show’s back half, as Edwina gradually starts to care for Anthony, remaining ignorant of her sister’s feelings right up until everything implodes. Meanwhile, everyone in their lives urges Kate and Anthony to just act on their feelings and get married, already, and this “follow your heart!” monologue passes from character to character until it becomes monotonous. Despite upping the stakes on Edwina’s marriage, giving the Sharmas a more interesting cross-cultural background, and giving Kate an intriguing conflict over her dual role as surrogate parental figure and stepdaughter — the Kate/Anthony/Edwina storyline ultimately feels more like filler than the side storylines it’s competing with. The season’s production was also halted twice due to Covid; still, the delays fail to fully explain why, at just eight episodes, this season feels unnecessarily long.

Thankfully, there are plenty of other compelling reasons to keep watching — chief among them being the evolving storyline involving Eloise Bridgerton (Claudia Jessie), her search for the mysterious scandal sheet writer Lady Whistledown, and her best friend Penelope “‘Pen’ is for ‘pen name’” Featherington (Nicola Coughlan). Eloise and Pen, one fed up with society, the other longing to truly participate in it, deliver the show’s most intriguing conflict — and the most subtextually suggestive. Although all of the Bridgerton books feature heterosexual romances, including ones for Eloise, Pen, and the artistic Bridgerton brother, Benedict, these characters’ arcs in particular lend themselves to queer readings. Of course, the plot steering these characters toward heterosexual romances doesn’t preclude readings of them as bisexual or pansexual; but the text seems to actively resist such interpretations, nor has it really earned any of them, at least not yet.

Then again, that makes me excited for the show’s third season, and the potential further development of Eloise’s many awakenings, Pen’s growing self-confidence, and Benedict’s fledgling creative life. Around and in between the lackluster main romances, Bridgerton teems with liveliness, and fun, and a broader story about family, friendships, and self-discovery. That’s the Bridgerton that really came to life in season two, and ultimately that’s the version of Bridgerton that most viewers will enjoy. It may not be the version book fans were hoping for — but it’s the one that strikes closest to the show’s heart, and the one that keeps Bridgerton feeling fresh.

And if it can just learn to treat its romances with as much care and fondness as its friendships, who knows? Bridgerton might yet crystallize into a diamond of the first water.

Everybody is arguing about what else is causing inflation

I would like to be able to tell you a coherent story about inflation where everyone absolutely agrees with all certainty what is going on. But I cannot. So instead, I’m going to pop through some theories that some economists say are contributing and others say are not.

Some experts argue that what’s fostering inflation is that the government put too much money into circulation. Basically, the argument goes, the federal government did three giant stimulus packages pumping trillions of dollars into the economy, and that’s driven prices up. A lot of these people point to the $1,400 stimulus checks that went out in early 2021.

Furman, the Harvard economist, thinks the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan signed into law in early 2021 helped create some of the inflation we’re seeing now. “I think by the time we did the American Rescue Plan, the economy was healing rapidly, households had more money in their bank accounts than they’d ever had before, and jobs were being added rapidly. I just think there was no need for anything on that scale,” he said.

Not everybody, or even a ton of people, agrees with this view, but it’s a view out there. Amarnath said he thinks it would “be wrong to dismiss all sources of demand-side support.” But it’s not the basket he’s placing all his eggs in. “It doesn’t seem obvious that all the people who received the stimmy checks spent the stimmy checks on things that proved to be inflationary.”

It does feel a little iffy to say that giving less-well-off people benefits that included a little over $1,000 tanked the economy, given all the support the government gives to corporations and rich people all the time.

Many progressive economists and politicians are beginning to argue that it’s corporate consolidation that’s making inflation worse. They say that companies have a ton of power (they do) and can set prices at whatever they like because there’s not a lot of competition (there often isn’t). They then say that companies are boosting inflation higher by using the problem as an excuse to increase prices so they can make more profits. Matt Stoller, director of research at anti- monopoly think tank the American Economic Liberties Project, argued in December that the pandemic rise in corporate profits accounts for nearly two-thirds of US inflation increases.

“At the end of the day, yeah, corporations do have the power to change prices,” Melodia said.

The point of companies is to make money, so of course that’s what they’re doing right now, even with inflation. “Saying it’s corporate greed implies that we are surprised corporations are greedy, but that’s like complaining that tigers are hungry. The question is what to do about it in terms of antitrust and tax policy,” Silvers said.

At the same time, is consolidation the main thing behind inflation? There’s reportedly some disagreement even within the White House about whether this is a useful argument. Many of the people placing blame on corporate profiteering acknowledge it’s just a part of what’s going on, not the whole story. Some economists dismiss it altogether.

The whole debate is like this: Some economists say rising wages are contributing to inflation, and others present evidence it’s absolutely not the case. Expectations play a role here — when everybody thinks inflation is happening, then businesses start charging more and workers start charging more money to compensate, which makes the whole thing worse.

“Once you have inflation, there’s some self-perpetuation of it,” Furman said. “There’s some passthrough of wages to prices, and some passthrough of prices to wages. Inflation expectations matter.”

If you know exactly how to fix inflation, call me (and by “me,” I mean “Jay Powell”)

There are no easy answers as to how to address rising inflation or quick fixes that will make this entire episode come to an end.

On a domestic level, the Fed, headed by Jay Powell, has started to raise interest rates. That should do something. The idea is that when the Fed raises rates it makes it more expensive to borrow money, which means less spending and less demand. But there’s concern that doing so could push the US economy toward a recession, like what happened after inflation in the 1970s, or that at the very least that it will cost some workers some jobs. Powell has indicated he’s willing to be aggressive about interest rate hikes to combat inflation if need be.

“I think that raising rates, at this point, is more about trying to get lucky,” Furman said. “Maybe it resets inflation expectations and so the self-fulfilling wage-price passthrough goes away. That’s the cheapest and easiest way to bring down inflation, to bring expectations down.”

Brad DeLong, an economist at UC Berkeley, has a modestly more relaxed view on inflation. “My answer is calm down, it’s by and large a desirable part of adjustments. We look out at what people are expecting in the future, and in five to 10 years from now, people are expecting inflation to quiet down. The Fed will do its job,” he said.

Some inflation problems might be out of the Fed’s reach, even domestically. Rent prices, which go into the services bucket, are about to cause more inflation going forward. If you think that part of the problem in that arena is that there’s too little housing, and rising interest rates could make building housing more expensive (because it will be more expensive to borrow), that doesn’t solve the problem. Which is what makes this whole thing complicated.

The White House and President Joe Biden have also taken some measures to try to address inflation, but what they can do is pretty limited (despite some Republicans trying to insist that this is largely Biden’s fault). They’ve rolled out a supply chain task force and made efforts to address issues such as bottlenecks at ports and semiconductor shortages. But it’s not like President Biden has a “stop inflation” button on his desk — which, if he did have one, he would definitely use.

“The White House has been very engaged with the problem of bottlenecks using the ordinary powers of government, but it takes time,” Silvers said. “The administration is addressing longstanding problems in our infrastructure and our manufacturing base that were allowed by prior administrations to go on for years and, in some cases, decades.”

“The advantage of the pandemic is it has thrown our economy into disarray to the extent that people are asking big questions about how do we come up with long-term solutions. The downside is that there’s no quick fix,” Melodia said.

If inflation really persists, the federal government could look into raising taxes or cutting spending, but some of that wouldn’t just entail the White House; you’d also need Congress.

Much of what’s causing inflation is also beyond the United States’s borders. Oil is a global commodity, and Russia’s war on Ukraine has pushed oil prices up even more than they were before. There’s very little the US can do about China’s zero-Covid policy, and even if China tweaks it, the virus there and elsewhere will create supply chain disruptions again.

We’d already seen the effect of supply chain issues and the pressure of commodity and energy prices prior to the war, Weber explained, but it has become worse in recent weeks. She noted that international cooperation would likely be needed to try to stabilize some commodity markets.

“It seemed like an expectable type of outcome from the war and the sanctions that you would get very major turmoil in the commodity markets,” Weber said. “Given how sectoral this inflation is, I think we need more policy action that is targeted to specific sectors.”

Again, different ideas for fixing inflation depend on what you think is causing it. For those in the camp that government stimulus and an overly accommodative Fed are part of the problem, that means that in the future, they’ll push for less stimulus and a less lenient Fed. For those in the corporate power camp, solutions look like better antitrust enforcement, taxes on corporate profits, or maybe even price controls. There are plenty of ideas out there about strategies to address issues in oil supply and to combat some inflationary pressures through health care policies, among others.

More broadly, some of the fixes for inflation are just going to take some time. Production capacity will get moving again, demand will cool off, maybe some necessary investments will be made.

It would be nice if there were one neat trick to solve inflation. There is not. The good news is, things will probably get better eventually. They just might get worse — and in turn cause a lot of pain — first.

Neutrality for Ukraine would also seem to be the ideal political instrument: a former Soviet Republic that could become a buffer between Russia and the rest of Europe, managing ties with both. That’s why the idea of neutral Ukraine wasn’t born out of this war. But agreeing to that status now, amid one, is even more complicated.

The complicated questions around Ukrainian neutrality

Russia continues to bombard cities and destroy civilian infrastructure like hospitals and a theater. More than 1,000 Ukrainian civilians have been confirmed killed as of March 25 (a number likely much higher that will continue to rise) and more than 10 million people have been displaced, with more than 3.7 million of them fleeing to other countries. The Russian army has seen astounding casualties, too, with NATO saying possibly as many as 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed so far. Meanwhile, Western sanctions are strangling Russia’s economy, leaving ordinary Russians to suffer.

The costs multiply each day the war goes on. The best hope for a ceasefire, and a longer-term truce, may be an agreement on Ukraine’s neutral status.

Ukraine committed to neutrality in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union; each of its swings away from neutrality was usually in response to Russian threats or aggression. Russia does have valid security concerns about NATO being on its borders. But Putin’s rhetoric has denied Ukrainian statehood and demanded the “demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine,” a false attack that is largely code for regime change.

Putin’s maximalist position doesn’t really square with just accepting neutrality — although battlefield losses and Ukraine’s resistance may have changed Moscow’s calculus. But even so, that leads to another problem: Who trusts Putin now?

“There were probably at least a dozen international agreements that Russia signed with Ukraine that did commit Russia to respecting Ukraine’s December 1991 borders, yet, the Russian government has shown no importance to adhering to those obligations,” said Kramer, of Harvard’s Davis Center.

An agreement between Ukraine and Russia on neutrality won’t be sufficient. Vlad Mykhnenko, an economic geographer at the University of Oxford who has written about the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, said even if there is a treaty, little is stopping Russia from breaking it. “What happens then, if [Putin] says: ‘Oh, actually, we don’t like it. I’m going in, there is something we don’t like in Ukraine, and we have to clear it out.’”

That may be the biggest question about Ukraine’s neutral status: Who is going to guarantee it stays that way?

That is where the rest of the world comes in, likely the US and its allies. And a lot depends on what risks they are willing to tolerate — and whether that would be acceptable to Ukraine or Russia.

Mykhnenko said that if a neutral Ukraine was again attacked, there should be a “guarantee to provide military help, and boots on the ground.”

The obvious candidates to back Ukraine are those that have the most at stake: Europe, the US, and NATO. But some suggested it might take more than that, and countries like China might need to get involved to help enforce and sweeten the deal for Russia.

How strong these guarantees are matters. If they involve NATO allies committing to backing Ukraine up in case Russia goes full-scale invasion again, that would be a lot like NATO membership in all but name. “Would the United States or other NATO countries be allowed to use military force if an agreement in the family is violated? That, I think, may be a bridge too far for the Russians at this point,” said P. Terrence Hopmann, a professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University.

But, Hopmann added, given the bad faith Putin has shown in negotiations, it will be difficult for Ukraine to accept neutrality without some serious security guarantees. Other experts said non-military mechanisms, like automatic sanctions or other penalties, are an option. But it seems unlikely those would be sufficient for a country that is pleading with the West for a no-fly zone.

“That’s the circle that’s hard to square in this case,” Hopmann said. “That’s where we’re stuck right now, in many ways.”

Neutrality, but then what?

If Russia does accept Ukrainian neutrality, it will likely be because Putin’s quick victory plan has floundered. But in Ukraine, where the vast majority of the public wants to fight, and believes they will win, neutral status feels much more loaded than it might have a month ago.

“It’s much harder now for Ukrainians to accept this under the pressure of the Russian military threat and a war going on in [their] country,” Hopmann said. “It looks like now they’re doing it under the barrel of a gun, rather than as the voluntary wishes of the Ukrainian population.”

Ukrainians under siege are also deeply skeptical that neutrality is what Russia wants. “Russia will not honor any security guarantees because Russia will accept nothing less than Ukraine’s destruction,” said Mychailo Wynnyckyj, a sociologist from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. “It’s not about status, it’s about existence.”

Those who see a neutral Ukraine as the only solution to end the war are seeing this more multipolar world through a realist lens. There are big powers in competition, and there are weaker powers who get caught in the middle, and they are likely to be forced into choices for their survival, whether or not they fit with ideas of democracy and freedom and self- determination.

Neutrality may solve one dilemma, but any negotiated deal between Russia and Ukraine will almost certainly address issues beyond neutrality. Some of the demands Russia has reportedly put forward include the so- called “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine. Denazification is fake, and likely an effort at regime change — something that Ukrainians, who have rallied around Zelenskyy’s leadership, will not agree to right now.

Exactly what demilitarization means is also unclear, but experts said it could mean limits on Ukraine’s offensive weapons or troop numbers. But the idea that Ukraine would give up its military after just being invaded seems unfathomable, and, again, most neutral countries maintain armies.

And of course there are the questions of Ukraine’s territory, and whether Moscow will demand the recognition of Russian control of Crimea and/or try to carve out the Donbas, where Russia has declared two regions independent, and where it appears to be escalating its offensive.

But these discussions are happening amid a war that is making it hard for either side to engage in diplomacy, as they’re still trying to win concessions by other means. Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, who is helping to broker the talks, said recently that while there is momentum, “it’s not that easy to negotiate while the war is ongoing or to agree when civilians are dying.”

“The outcome of the war will be decided on the battlefield,” Mykhnenko said. “I’m afraid that’s a basic truth. Whatever discussion, decisions, debates, negotiations are taking place in Belarus or Istanbul — all of that is just a sideshow.”

But all wars, whether fought to a draw or with a clear victor, end in agreements. The only difference is how much suffering and destruction happens in the process of getting there. Advocates for Ukrainian neutrality believe the sooner that happens, the sooner it will spare Ukraine, and the rest of Europe, from more tragedy.

“In the end,” said Lottaz, the professor for neutrality studies, “it will be a Ukrainian model, it will be unique — if it becomes something. But again, it’s either neutrality or Afghanistan. At least I don’t see another way out.”

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